Dramatically Different 2013

Early on in Girl Scout Troop 1550 when we were chasing each other through the woods, hiding itching powder in sleeping bags, and exploring the wonderful world of Bunsen burners for the first time, we learned the motto “Leave only footprints and take only pictures.”  It’s another way of saying “Enjoy and appreciate the environment, but don’t make things worse.  Don’t disrupt nature – Be part of it.”

I love this saying, and I think there’s more to it – There’s also something in here that inspires me to make things better.  If we deeply enjoy and appreciate the environment, we will want to care for it and improve it.  I believe that we were put on this earth to do something that will make things better by the time we leave.  If we take an authentic exploration within ourselves, we will find something we are passionate about, and we can imagine a service or a job that not only stimulates our deepest desires, but also helps other people and/or helps the environment.  Helping ourselves and helping others are fully connected and ultimately the same.

We see it around us every day in news media and in pictures across the web:  A zookeeper delivering and caring for baby tigers, a group of inner city children growing an organic garden, a young man helping an elderly woman cross a busy street in Tokyo, a doctor in Africa providing medicine and health care for AIDS victims, neighbors coming together and cleaning up after a natural disaster, a charitable organization accepting a large check from an anonymous donor.  These mental images bring glowing warmth to my heart because they represent people who are part of the solution.

During yoga teacher training, Rolf Gates often advised us to “be where people are saying YES to the human potential.”  In other words, we have a choice about how we spend our time and with whom we spend it.  We can choose to be complacent or we can choose to live from a higher purpose.  It’s an inspiring proposal, for sure; but when it comes down to application, how do we really “say yes” to the human potential?

For many of us, we have intentions to live on purpose and to help others, but our intentions are somewhat vague or murky, and the exercise of figuring out what it is that we want to do is daunting.  Here are some reasons why we are hesitant to take this exploration:

1. It’s not every day that we ask our brains and bodies to think about or to feel into our “life’s purpose.”  We often don’t have the tools or support to ask the right questions or be facilitated in a safe way.
2. If we start questioning our current lifestyle, and the choices/actions that got us here, we may uncover some really difficult or negative emotions, beliefs, and patterns.  This is scary.
3. Once we figure out what it is that we want to do/be, we think it would be impossible to achieve these intentions without lots of time or money.  We think we would be required to make a lot of life changes.

Unfortunately (and fortunately), some or all of these things will happen during this exploration.  We will be forced to navigate some of this process “alone.”  Teachers can guide us and support us, but ultimately, this is an inside job.  We will be forced to look at our lives with a microscope and really start to see things as they are.  We will question our beliefs and choices.  We will be happy about many, but also saddened and disappointed by others.  We will be scared and we will feel lost at times.  We will find that we can fulfill some of our intentions/dreams with minor changes to our life, but we will eventually realize that major shifts will be required for the way that we serve going forward.  We will also realize that this process is not a “one and done” type of thing.  It is something that we will continue to do over and over and over again.  As time changes, so does our internal landscape.

For those of us passionate enough, awake enough, and courageous enough to venture into this territory, it is part of the process to confront these barricades, and to do so with compassion.  We learn that the only way out is through.

It all starts with an inquiry…

On Monday afternoon I met with my boss, Jamie McIntyre, and he encouraged me to take part in an exercise by answering the following question, and to do so without borders:

What does a dramatically different 2013 look like?

• Paint the picture…
• What do I want to achieve?
• What do I want to see?
• How do I want to be?
• Think BIG
• This can/should include things I cannot attain
• Write and explore these questions

After work I went home to my bedroom, lit a candle, closed my eyes, and sat quietly thinking about this for a long time.  I noticed how I felt in my body.  There was a sense of calm and also a subtle hint of anxiety.  Fear arose in my chest as I thought about how it would be impossible to integrate my “life’s work” with my day job.  And from fear came sadness… Sadness for all the ways I would need to change and what I would leave behind when I change.  And then I started to write.  I wrote for a while and when I finally stopped, I had 5 pages of notes.  Here are some of them:

• Live in the mountains
• Go hiking everyday
• Practice yoga everyday
• Eat all my meals surrounded by friends and loved ones
• Grow a garden from which I can feed myself
• Cook all my meals from fresh, organic whole foods
• Know when to “allow” and when to “do”
• Master guitar
• Join a jazz band and play guitar and drums
• Community is the most important thing in my life right now… Be in community.  Fully.
• My true calling is to help others, to heal others, and to create community… Do this everyday
• Learn more outdoors/survival skills… Master these skills
• Live on the beach for a few months
• More unstructured fun
• Facilitate people in awakening their creativity
• Make $400,000
• Imagine that it’s possible to be truly SELFLESS without a lot of money
• Practice more gratitude
• Trust the experiment
• Wake up every single day excited and grateful to go to work
• See beauty in the work that I do

This cathartic process facilitated a shift inside.  I got away from the chaos and minutia of daily tasks and I rediscovered what is most important to me on a cellular level.  Among the standard wants and needs purged onto the paper, I was able to uncover some nuggets of beauty and brilliance.

The real gift from this exercise is that I was able to envision a way to bridge the gap between my daily tasks and my life’s purpose [more to come on that in future posts].  What I most feared (not being able to bridge the gap), ended up being the thing that inspired me the most during this process.

The next logical inquiry is this: What’s between me and being able to LIVE a dramatically different 2013?

That’s where it gets juicy.  Chew on it.

In the meantime, try out this writing exercise.  Open to possibility.  Look for nuggets of beauty and brilliance.  See what manifests and have the intention to live from that deep place of purpose.

[Thanks, Jamie!]

Hint: the cage is not locked

Deep gratitude for Rolf Gates’ inspiring stories and teachings.  Here is an excerpt from his book, Meditations from the Mat.

“Sauca is the moment on our path when we begin to take the maintenance of our physical condition seriously.  My own beginnings were quite humble.  I spent the last few years before my spiritual awakening routinely going for weeks without a shower, sleeping on the ground, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, eating military rations that had been prepared years before, drinking as much alcohol as I could whenever I could, and wondering why I felt so bad most of the time.  True, this was my job description, but it was also a job I had chosen in the throes of spiritual bankruptcy.

Once I had emerged from that spiritual nadir and begun a spiritual practice, I started to look around.  The people I admired seemed to be treating their bodies well.  They appeared to have some principles about their food, their behavior, their beliefs and attitudes.  They exercised, wore clean clothes, lived in clean apartments.  There was a gentleness in all of this.  I had a sense that these habits were an extension of the love these individuals felt toward themselves and others.  I had exercised to win competitions, and I’d ironed my uniforms to pass military inspections, but I had never thought of these activities as a means of taking care of myself.  Sauca confirms my observations of my early role models.  Our body is the home of our spirit.  It is the means by which we enact our beliefs.  Therefore, the maintenance of the body is a spiritual duty, and act of love not only toward ourselves but toward all humanity.

Practicing sauca, we are also turning belief into action.  We have embraced a path that is about freedom and love.  As we care gently and lovingly for ourselves, we are deconstructing the blocks to love in our lives and freeing ourselves from the prison of outworn patterns of thought and action.  And we need to start somewhere.  Yoga says we should start where we are, on the physical plane, with our bodies and the acts of our bodies.  Furthermore, we must begin to see our minds as organs of action, and our thoughts as acts.  Each step we take on this path is a step into the unknown and a confirmation of our ability to live a better life.  The people whose practice of sauca I watched and admired early on in my spiritual journey were actually doing it: they were enacting their spiritual beliefs in a tangible, everyday way.  Sauca is an invitation to spread your wings a little bit, to experience your freedom, to take small steps with big consequences, to break free.  Go ahead.  Hint: the cage is not locked.”

The Agile Evolution

There’s a lot of buzz these days around Agile software development and how successful it has proven to be for many businesses.  We hear uplifting stories about groups of brilliant, unshaven, hipster software developers in jeans and ironic t-shirts who take a break from their latest Whole Foods excursion and casually congregate in cube-less office warehouses with brightly colored walls, complete with 4 monitors per programmer, to magically create the next “big thing” to hit the technology arms race.

What’s that?  An app that drives my Prius, submits my “tall skim half-caf latte” order to the closest Starbucks, and writes this blog at the same time?

Well, this app doesn’t actually exist yet, but I’m pretty sure that at least one of the above mentioned hipsters is reading this right now frothing at the mouth as they fantasize about daily scrums, unit test creation, and countless hours sitting at a desk blasting guilty pleasures through $200 headphones, while they write code for it.  [No need to give me credit when you hit the jackpot on this one.]

So what is actually going on with these so-called Agile teams?  How are we able to be creative, competitive, and successful in a casual environment?  Has “software development” evolved into a fun and collaborative activity?

Agility really boils down to our group’s ability to adapt, our motivation to reinvent, and our willingness to question everything we know.

Adaptation: The landscape of the market is changing quickly these days and there are more people with access to education and technology, so adaptation is a requirement for survival.  We can’t control the environment changing around us.  It just changes.  If we don’t change with the environment, or change even faster than the environment, we will be left behind.  Just look at what Crayola has done recently.  Yes, people still draw on paper with crayons, but we also now draw on iPads.  So Crayola has adapted and created the Color Studio HD, which integrates coloring with iPad technology.  Crayola cannot stop the market from wanting to use iPads, but they can adapt to the market and provide a way to color on an iPad.

Reinvention: As technology advances, the needs of our users are becoming more advanced and we need to reinvent our solutions to meet these needs.  Our clients should also know that we are willing to reinvent ourselves, as well.  Otherwise, they will go somewhere else that is.  For instance, the web portal we released in 2008 is practically a dinosaur compared to the web portal we released just 3 years later.  Not only is the technology from 2008 slow and bulky compared to what we have now, but the features and functionality that we built in 2008 are completely different than how we redesigned them in 2011.  We also changed our site’s web address, our color scheme, and our graphics.  All of this makes a statement about who we are and how we are willing to change.

Questioning Knowledge and Beliefs: This is probably the most important and most challenging category of the 3.  Einstein once said that “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”  So how do we think differently?  I have found that asking questions is a supportive tool when our intention is to shift our thinking.  When I show up at a requirements gathering session with a client, I often bring a list of questions.  The goal of asking questions is not only to extract information from the other person, but it also supports the other person in becoming an innovator and helps generate some new ideas.  One of the most important factors in creating an Agile atmosphere is asking the “right” questions.  I consider a question to be “right” when the person answering is inspired and open in their response.  When I ask limiting questions, I get limiting responses.  When I ask expansive and creative questions, I get expansive and creative responses.  Ask yourself these 2 questions and observe how your experience changes when you answer them:

1. How am I going to get through this day at work?
2. How can I make today the best workday of my life?

My intention is to spend most of my time asking questions in the realm of #2, and it’s quite transformational.  The benefit of asking expansive questions is that it gets us to think outside of our typical realm of possibility.  I didn’t even realize it was possible to make today the best day of my life until I asked that question!  [Credit to Jonathan Foust on this process]

How Does a Team Function to Achieve Agility?

Agile software development can be exciting, fun, and powerful.  If we are functioning well, we will rarely get stuck in a rut or burnt out.  The team is constantly challenging each other to find more creative ways to solve problems, and we do it together so there’s no single person drowning or struggling.  We carry each other and we share responsibilities.  We also celebrate a lot.  When we work together this way, the results speak for themselves – we have happy clients and users, and more people want to buy our services and products.  Once we maintain this success over a sustained period of time, we actually look forward to coming to the office and doing this work together.

A teacher once told me that community is stronger than willpower, and over the past few years I have come to appreciate the power of being part of a team.  I have observed cross-functional and cross-knowledge groups of people solving problems more creatively, and ultimately better, than a single person solving that same problem.  The group also seemed to be extremely successful at solving future problems and coming up with unique ways to provide the market with innovative tools on an ongoing basis.  The word ongoing also alludes to the fact that the team survives and thrives.  Anyone can create a “one hit wonder” but the team that continues to provide great solutions will be around longer.

This concept makes sense in theory, and seems attractive, but if a group is left to its own devices, it can spin dangerously out of control.  I read Lord of the Flies in Mr. Yim’s English class when I was 17 and I still remember what happened to Piggy.  Perhaps this fueled my subconscious desire to create and be part of harmonious groups.  I don’t want anyone to go down with the conch.

Regardless of the level of intelligence or creativity, the years of experience, or the knowledge base of its members, a group needs just enough guidance and just enough structure to maintain its health and success.  And for an Agile group, there is an additional need for constant transformation, so it is important to have guidance and structure that fosters adaptation, reinvention, and the desire to be inquisitive.  Fortunately, there is a leadership role that promotes these principles.  This is where the Agile Facilitator comes in.

Within every successful Agile team there is at least one Agile Facilitator.  They may not go by the title “Agile Facilitator,” but the role is definitely being filled.  In the world of Agile, we shun micro-management and move towards facilitation.  The Agile Facilitator is guiding the group, rather than managing the group.  They are a Sherpa and an advocate for the team.

When I was growing up, my Dad and I would often watch Mt. Everest expedition documentaries.  People from the West would train for years and eventually fly east to Nepal and risk their lives for a chance to reach the summit.  From a young age, I was always most impressed with and most interested in the Sherpa.  The Sherpa would guide the group, act as a life line for the group, and support the group on their path to transformation.  Not only do I admire the service that the Sherpa provides, but I love that they do it for the sake of the team.  It is a true selfless service.

In the yoga tradition, the term “seva” represents one’s willingness and desire to serve for the greater good.  In other words, “seva” translates to selfless service.  The Agile Facilitator, like the Sherpa, embraces “seva” to support the team in achieving their goals, and is willing to do it in a way that is mindful, creative, and enjoyable.  Selfless service is driven by mindfulness, rather than ego.  On an Agile team there is no room for ego.  We all have an ego, and it still shows up occasionally, but in an Agile environment, the ego does not run the agenda.  It is quite moving.  Just imagine how this mindset could change other parts of our lives.

Being part of the Agile evolution has been energizing and supportive to Fortigent.  It’s all one big, beautiful experiment.  We have even applied Agile principles to other parts of our business and it has been fun to embrace the transformation.  While we still have cubes and business attire, I heard there’s a fresh can of neon pink paint stashed around here somewhere, ready to be applied.